Bowling can be quite an enjoyable sport, and it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to knock down those pins alone to better your score or competing against someone else. Unless you’re Death Alley‘s Jimmy that is, in which case… well, he might regret challenging this particular opponent, for unless he can beat Death’s score, Jimmy’s life will belong to the Grim Reaper.
There are no fancy tricks or power-ups to help Jimmy either. Oh wait, that’s not entirely right: he does have the ability to throw that little red spherical object at extreme speeds, even if it is rather tricky to pull off. See, once our potentially doomed protagonist starts each throw, a meter will appear at the bottom of the screen, and to truly smash those pins, players are required to time button presses so the white line is inside the yellow bar. Every single time. Fail and the ball will fly way off course, all too likely ending up in the gutter, netting you zero points (for that one person out there who doesn’t know the rules of bowling).
It isn’t just a matter of nailing that first button press either. Nope. Bowling against Death is going to take a lot more than that, and after playing for a bit, I’d say that beating him is by no means an easy task (spoiler: I didn’t manage that prior to writing this article). The animation of Jimmy walking up to the line before finally throwing is likely slower than how most would bowl for a reason: to make room for additional timing mini-games with a yellow bar that shrinks with each successful attempt. Did I mention how this is not an easy game? It does make for a much stronger feeling of accomplishment when you pick up those strikes, though.
Death Alley (LD44) is available for free from itch.io for Windows, macOS, Linux, and browser (HTML5).
